Between the Romance and the Real: Experiencing Jamesian Reading

Reading and writing have this in common: they are particular distortions of general realities.

—Edward Said (59)

An exemplary Jamesian scene of reading occurs in the famous allusion to Keats in The Golden Bowl. While probing the inner-workings of Adam Verver’s mind, James layers readings upon readings that ironically yield just as much insight into the untrodden regions of James’s mind as they do into the mind of the American collector. To access the “immense meaning” that Verver sees in the “business of his future” ( GB 550), James describes Verver seeing Keats seeing Chapman seeing Homer, which, in turn, gives the reader purview of James’s labyrinthine consciousness as it apprehends its character. ¹ This scene’s web of allusions beautifully exemplifies the affinities between seeing and reading that the novel’s preface makes clear: “To revise is to see, or to look over again—which means in the case of the written thing neither more nor less than to re-read it” ( AN 338–39). ² Although James speaks of reading in terms of the “written thing,” the scene in question demonstrates that reading has implications beyond the material text. The multifarious readings that occur at this moment in The Golden Bowl all involve the unique ability to navigate the relationship between a series of texts (Keats’s sonnet, Homer’s epic, The Golden Bowl) and consciousnesses (James, Verver, Keats, Chapman, Cortez). It is an ability that makes Jamesian reading a peculiar activity, one that this essay will explore.

The preface to The Golden Bowl is the crucial document for any discussion of reading in James, yet, as one noted critic argues, it does not offer a theory of reading. ³ Such an all-encompassing theory is not, however, my intention. This essay is an attempt, or a sketch, that seeks to understand how James experiences reading. ⁴ Subsequently, my method will be to juxtapose two moments from two different prefaces that demonstrate the relationship between text and consciousness. ⁵ Reading, as James describes in the preface to The Golden Bowl, is the process of moving from a text into a consciousness, but in order to understand that dynamic we must first consider how a consciousness creates a text. The preface to The Tragic Muse clarifies this other movement, from a mind into a text, by discussing how James understands his method of composition. The reciprocal relationship between these two acts, reading and writing, allows me to conclude, finally, by turning to an additional preface, the preface to The American, one that allegorizes the entire process of Jamesian reading. ⁶

The epigraph by Edward Said validates my need to conclude with this third preface. Reading and writing are “particular distortions of a general reality,” Said argues, because “there is a violence in texts, which is answered by the reconstructions of examining critics” (59). If we are to understand the text-mind dualism that encompasses reading and writing, we must also, following Said’s lead, understand what engenders this dualism in the first place. Where does it begin? Or, in other words, what is the nature of this violence? What is it, exactly, that we critics must reconstruct? Said continues: “To begin to apprehend a text is to begin to find intention and method in it—not, in other words, to reduce a text to a continuous stream of words from a disembodied voice, but rather to construct the field of its play, its dispersion, its distortion.” In a recent essay on James and Said, Jonathan Arac hints at the field of play that emerges in the scene from The Golden Bowl discussed above. ⁷ My interest, however, is not to ruminate over the “field of play” that emerges in the three prefaces I will discuss. Rather, while acknowledging that such rumination is an inevitable by-product of any critical endeavor, my goal is to illustrate how James understands the process of constructing such a field. Examining how he experiences reading will help show that James sees the reader’s active role as a participant in the creation and interpretation of a...