Places of Memory

This talk/essay explores James’s idea of what he calls “the visiting mind” as it calls on the distant past. The focus is the volume A Small Boy and Others, where James’s reconstruction of “the history of [his] fostered imagination” is performed by this imagination itself: a work not of destiny, as it may seem, but of narrative. James’s identification with his “odd” relative Henry Wyckoff, a man who was not allowed to live freely because he was thought to be too would to be given such a chance, is evoked as partial and ironic but very revealing.