The Senses of the Past. On Reading and Experience in James

142 The Henry James Review James Society Meetings: New Orleans, 1988 Editor's Note: The James Society meetings in 1988 were arranged by Mark Seltzer (and, because Professor Seltzer was unable to attend, presided over by Dan Fogel). Here we present only two of the papers read in New Orleans, pieces by Deborah Esch and Jennifer Wicke. In future issues, we hope to publish fuU, article-length versions of some of the other papers from the 1988 Society meetings. One such paper, WiUiam Veeder's "The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realization in Henry James," is already scheduled to appear in volume 11 of the HJR. Deborah Esch—The Senses of the Past. On Reading and Experience in James In his essays and prefaces, James sets his readers an example of a rigorous theorist as weU as a scrupulous reader and self-reader. It is seldom that we need venture outside the corpus in search of an adequate critical vocabulary, for James consistenüy takes pains to provide many of the terms for a rigorous analysis of his own work. Partly as a result, the history of James interpretation affords a succession of critics who have learned their terms and techniques from "the master" (this epithet, from "The Lesson of the Master," is itself a case in point). Indeed, only a naive reader would think of trying to circumvent the territory already staked out by the author, for James is active on several fronts at once, and has attended in advance not only to the key aesthetic categories, but to the epistemological and the ethico-potitical as weU. The greater temptation is rather to let James do the interpretive work in the reader's stead, to bask more or less passively in the authoritative light cast by the author-as-critic. In this regard, however, a degree of circumspection is perhaps in order, for certain risks are run when this faith in James leads to the straightforward appropriation, with some editorial sifting, of what are deemed the most suggestive among the terms the author provides, which are then duly reapplied to the fictive and autobiographical work. As it turns out, the Jamesian vocabulary seldom yields itself without exacting considerable critical reflection. It requires, in other words, a reading that looks past face values and received ideas in order to ask how the terms function, both in their specific context and for purposes of a more general understanding of James. So whüe we take our cues from him, we ought also to aUow for the possibUity of a tension (hopefuUy productive) between James's terms and their critical redeployment. Within our time constraints, I would like to consider briefly a set of terms that has had a direct bearing on the history of James interpretation, from contemporary reviews to some of the most recent critical accounts of his work. I take as point of departure a remark James made in a letter to Edward Lee Childe, to the effect that "reading tends for me to take the place of experience." There would be much to say about the terms of this formulation, and the substitution James locates here—about the question of the relationship between linguistic and historical structures and constructions of meaning, and the place of each in the Selected Papers on Henry James 143 present theoretical and institutional landscapes. But I limit myself here to some schematic remarks on reading and experience in James. "Experience" is a category to which the great majority of his critics sooner or later authoritatively appeal; these include, to name only the best-known contributors to the Anglo-American interpretive tradition, Leavis, Matthiessen, Blackmur , Edel, Poirier, HoUand. Among the most thoughtful and phüosophicaUy informed analysts of Jamesian experience is Georges Poulet, a distinguished participant in the so-caUed Geneva school of uterary criticism. In a chapter of Les Métamorphoses du cercle, Poulet argues for the centrality of Jamesian experience with great conviction. Though this essay first appeared in 1961, it retains a symptomatic value that continues to warrant our interest. From the outset, Poulet is able to marshal an impressive range of textual evidence in support of his interpretation...