Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World (review)

Each generation claims Henry James as its own. Yet the precise terms and favorite motifs that support an image of our James, those qualities that permit us to speak of him as a contemporary and also reveal the historicity of the moment of possession, may seem at certain critical impasses to be strangely reversible. Under the pressure of close scrutiny our James may suddenly take the shape of a figure strikingly distant from the historical present. Or, as Hazel Hutchison reframes the matter in Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World, the limit-point of a predominant set of terms inevitably evokes its Derridean supplement.

The specific logic of supplementarity that guides Hutchison through the strongest chapters of her study, which offer penetrating close readings of individual fictions, begins with the familiar terms of (what appears to be) James's contemporaneity to our own moment—his skepticism regarding the descriptive efficacy of language and the relativistic epistemology of his late fictions. Against the contemporizing trend, however, Hutchison's James is not easily transportable to the twenty-first century. She consistently characterizes his sensibility as late Victorian. This James's aesthetics tend to be Paterian, his ethics pragmatist. Similarly his relativism bears less resemblance to the postmodernist suspicion of metanarratives and more to the fin-de-siècle devaluation of scientific progressivism. "[T]he idea of relativity," Hutchison reminds us, "existed in philosophical and polemical debate long before it became a scientific tenet" (4). To see James differently, she suggests, involves returning him to his world. Thus Hutchison devotes considerable attention to those features of James's work that would likely appear least recognizable to today's readers, including most prominently the fascination with occult knowledge and experience. Under this rubric any number of elusive aspects of the late fiction may be listed: from the secret, unnameable insight into social life for which the narrator and his interlocutors search in The Sacred Fount (1901) to the obscure purpose behind Merton Densher's culminating renunciation in The Wings of the Dove (1902).

In advancing these claims, Hutchison clearly does not mean to overturn established paradigms within James scholarship. Seeing and Believing is too intensely focused on narrative detail to sustain an intervention into the entangled, broad-scale critical debate about James. It is distinguished, rather, by maintaining a scrupulous balance between familiar and unfamiliar sides of particular texts. The more familiar half of the dialectic identified in the book's title, the "seeing" half, forms the basis of an extended early chapter devoted to the dynamics of uncertainty in James. From perceptual uncertainty James develops a "language of uncertainty" (4) that, according to Hutchison, may even be understood as a kind of theory of language running parallel to Saussure's linguistics. In other words, relativism—as well as distinct yet related terms like skepticism and empiricism—should continue to be central concerns for the critic. Still, Hutchison contends, they do not fully explain the ongoing interest of James's fiction.

While most critics tend to dismiss those eccentric metaphors and fragments of dialogue that are embedded in a spiritual vocabulary as so many displacements of thematic content, Hutchison takes them seriously: "James's late style reveals more than its own virtuosity" (56). Fortunately her interpretation follows through on the promise contained in this assertion. Examination of the language of uncertainty that James "speaks" (4), comprised in no small part of the recurrent references to a "mystic throb" or an "occult relation" that dot his narratives, leads Hutchison to an impressive refinement of the Jamesian sense of the sacred. Again, the basic compensatory pattern is in place: the supernatural in James arises amidst the apparent exhaustion of natural explanation. Of The Sacred Fount, for instance, Hutchison observes how "[t]he epistemological uses of empiricism are strained to their limits in this novel" (58). At those limits, contrary to expectation, James finds not a creative dead-end but an impetus for further exploration: "[T]he...