The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James

Chapter 6: Phenomenological Hermeneutics: Henry James and Literary Impressionism

Chapter 6 Phenomenological Hermeneutics HenryJames and Literary Ill1pressionisll1 Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don't believe that there is any perception. -Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" What happened then, remarkably~ was that while I mechanically so argued my impression was fixing itself by a wild logic of its own~ and that I was presently to see how it would~ when once settled to a certain intensity~ snap its fingers at warrants and documents. - Henry James, The American Scene I NTH E FIN A L TWO C HAP T E R s of The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, I want to address two esthetic problems that normally are considered concerns of formalist criticism: literary impressionism and the implied reader. My placement of these chapters at the end of the study may appear curious to the reader, especially in consideration of the attention I have given to a strict narrative development from the literary influences of Chapter 2 to the broader social and historical issues in Chapter 5. Since I have argued that the "socialization" of Henry James is also an antiformalist enterprise, my reader might reasonably assume that such important formal concerns as the impression and the reader would be better discussed as preliminary to the more comprehensive perspectives of feminism, psychoanalysis , and sociological approaches to literature. Anticipating this expectation, I want to make a few prefatory remarks about the place of the final chapters in the overall narrative. And I want to emphasize again that my concern with a narrative design in this study is a defense against the nearly inevitable complaint that the various methods represented in this book lead the reader to conclusions regarding the desirable "pluralism" of literary interpretation. My use of Jameson's dialectical model for interpretation in Chapter 5 stressed the "ideology of form" as the ultimate analytical aim of critical understanding. Although I conclude Chapter 5 with a reading of James's manipulation of romantic and melodramatic devices for the sake of "disturbing" the realism of the novel, I also contend that any rigorous analysis of the way literary forms contribute to ideological forces of the culture would require a much more extensive interpretation than any single work or even single author might afford. This book approaches the goal of understanding the "ideology" of literary form - and its possible associations with the formal operations of other discursive practices of the culture (patriarchal attitudes, literary institutions and traditions, psychoanalytical practices) - in terms of its entire narrative. Just insofar as the narrative designs its diverse methods into an integrated (not unified) argument, then it begins to dramatize the relations among discursive practices that constitute the real power of the ideology. The coherent authority of a stable culture is achieved not as the consequence of some arithmetic accumulation of "parts," but as the dynamic interrelation of many different forces. Some of those forces are here represented by the different methods of literary approach; the ways that the limitations Literary Impressionism I9I of one approach may provoke the genesis of another (such as the development of sociological criticism out of the impasses of psychoanalysis ) are also the ways the discursive forms of the cultural order function. For some of these reasons, I have reversed the customary narrative progression of critical studies intent on transcending the limitations of formalist literary analysis and its complementary field, esthetics. Now that we have worked through a narrative that situates the principal themes of James's fiction in relation to social and political concerns , we may return to literary "form" in a decidedly new manner. The themes we have addressed are extremely familiar in the critical study of Henry James: artists and writers (Chapter 2), women in society (Chapter 3), psychological realism (Chapter 4), contemporary politics (Chapter 5). We have, of course, interpreted these themes in ways that go well beyond customary thematic criticism, but each chapter should recall one of these prevalent concerns in the study of Henry James. Having socialized and historicized those themes, we have some...