“So as Not to Arrive”: The Object-Theater of Late Jamesian Consciousness

Henry James’s late style in the House of Fiction metaphor and The Golden Bowl elicits a dual reading practice demanding both formal analysis that traces the dematerialization of objects in the fictional world and a reifying attitude that permits these objects a material presence around which scenes are constructed. At key moments, consciousness is simultaneously metaphorized as an object and theatricalized as a scene in which the conscious character interacts with the original object-metaphor. If the materiality and even figurality of these objects are unstable, it is in this phenomenal instability that these moments’ affective intensity originates.